Beautiful Scamp

And as he comes up spitting, I’m right on top of him.

“You ever fucking touch her again, you piece of shit,” I mutter as I kick him in the side, holding onto the wall for balance, “I’ll murder you and everyone you care about. I’ll bury your body so deep even archaeologists won’t be able to find it. And I’ll make you beg me to kill you before the end. You fucking hear me?” Each word is punctuated with a kick, and he curls up into a fetal ball in front of me, whining, nodding his head, begging for me to stop.

“Hey, I think he learned his lesson.” Her voice from behind me is like a warm summer rain, soothing and calming. And then she touches the side of my face and I almost keel over. The scumbag forgotten, I turn and see her smile.

“Are you all right?” I ask, closing my eyes against the brightness of her beauty, half expecting her to be gone when I open them again. “Angel, I…”

She laughs, and it’s that laugh that cuts through the fog, takes me back to another time. I feel my mind scrabbling desperately for a memory that is just out of reach. “I’m no angel,” she says, and then it hits me like a freight train.

Fuck. It can’t be. She can’t be… She’s just a skinny little kid, someone I took pity on in another lifetime. This vision of womanly perfection can’t possibly be her. But her voice is the same. Her ability to mix it up with men twice her size is the same. Her laugh is the same.

Feeling like the world is spinning, I catch her in my arms, no longer able to just look on perfection without touching, and choke out the word thundering in my head on repeat. Her name, or at least the one I gave her all that time ago.

“Scamp?”

Chapter 2 – Scamp

I stagger back, away from his arms, my heart suddenly thundering. How does he know my name? Scanning the alley behind him, I half expect to see my father’s goons standing there, waiting for me, ready to take me to him, but there’s no one.

There’s a flash of recognition though, something about the slight Hispanic undertone to his voice, about his stance, about his face. Familiar and yet not. His dark eyes are imprinted on my vision when I blink, like I’ve imagined them a million times before until they’re burned into the backs of my eyelids. His full lips, his straight nose, his thick, dark eyebrows. I recognize it all, yet I can’t place it. Like a dream that’s already fled and you can’t ever get it back.

Who is he and how do we know each other? Is he a hitman, someone I’ve met once and forgotten? No, that wouldn’t make sense. If he wanted to kill me he could easily have done so, he wouldn’t have saved me from those AB gangbangers.

Then what?

“Who are you and what do you want?” I demand, taking another step back. “I’ll fucking scream if I have to.”

His hands go up in front of his chest, placating, and he doesn’t move. Like a zookeeper trying to calm a cornered lioness. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says. “Don’t you remember me?”

“We don’t know each other. I’m not who you think I am.”

When he grins, I almost lose my footing. It’s an easy smile, wide and genuine, not creepy like my papa’s men. I have the sudden urge to kiss those full lips, to taste him, and again there’s that hint of familiarity, not with him but with that desire. Like I’ve wanted to kiss him before and had my heart broken.

“You’re exactly who I think you are,” he says. “You’re Scamp. Though I remember a tough little street kid with glasses and a bad attitude. Freckles and big round eyes. Still got the freckles I see.” He laughs, shaking his head. “Your little sister was called Penelope and she once swallowed a piece of bubblegum whole because you said it would be okay to give her some. And we sat up watching her just in case because neither of us knew what it might do to her insides.”

What? How does he?

Then it hits me, and when it does it hits me down low. My pelvic muscles spasm and I yelp as I squeeze my legs together, panicking as damp spreads between my thighs. It’s a reaction I’ve never had to a boy before, because when I last saw him I was too young. Back then, it was an infatuation. A crush. My first and last crush.

Valiant Garcia.

He was an older boy who took an interest in me, not in the way I wanted but it didn’t matter to my thirteen-year-old mind. He became the object of every fantasy.